WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, the second son of Walter Whitman, a house
builder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and
Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s.
At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade, and fell in love with the
written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works
of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district
demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as teacher in the
one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to
journalism as a full-time career.
He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and
New York papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New
Orleans Crescent. It was in New Orleans that he experienced first-hand the viciousness of slavery in
the slave markets of that city. On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a “free soil”
newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later
so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which
consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a
copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856,
containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open
letter by Whitman in response. During his lifetime, Whitman continued to refine the volume,
publishing several more editions of the book. Noted Whitman scholar, M. Jimmie Killingworth
writes that “the ‘merge,' as Whitman conceived it, is the tendency of the individual self to
overcome moral, psychological, and political boundaries. Thematically and poetically, the notion
dominates the three major poems of 1855: ‘I Sing the Body Electric,' ‘The Sleepers,' and ‘Song of
Myself,' all of which were ‘merged’ in the first edition under the single title Leaves of Grass but
were demarcated by clear breaks in the text and the repetition of the title.”
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life. He
worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City–area hospitals. He then
travelled to Washington, D. C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in
the war.
Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay
and work in the hospitals and stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the
Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan,
discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan
fired the poet.
Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington, he lived on a
clerk’s salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy
supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and
an invalid brother. From time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him “purses” of
money so that he could get by.
In the early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, New Jersey, where he had come to visit his
dying mother at his brother’s house. However, after suffering a stroke, Whitman found it
impossible to return to Washington. He stayed with his brother until the 1882 publication
of Leaves of Grass (James R. Osgood) gave Whitman enough money to buy a home in Camden.
 In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on
additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and
prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy (David McKay, 1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was
buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery. Along with Emily
Dickinson, he is considered one of America’s most important poets.

Transcendentalism: A 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New

England, who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based
on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the
supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.

TRANSCENDENTALISM is a very formal word that describes a very simple idea. People, men
and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that
"transcends" or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel.
This knowledge comes through intuition and imagination not through logic or the senses.
People can trust themselves to be their own authority on what is right. A Transcendentalist is a
person who accepts these ideas not as religious beliefs but as a way of understanding life
relationships.
The individuals most closely associated with this new way of thinking were connected
loosely through a group known as “The Transcendental Club”, which met in the Boston home of
George Ripley. Their chief publication was a periodical called "The Dial", edited by Margaret Fuller,
a political radical and feminist whose book "Women of the Nineteenth Century" was among the
most famous of its time. The club had many extraordinary thinkers, but accorded the leadership
position to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Transcendental Club was associated with colourful members between 1836 and 1860.
Among these were the literary figures: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt
Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau.
As a group, the transcendentalists led the celebration of the American experiment as one of
individualism and self-reliance. They took progressive stands on women's rights, abolition, reform,
and education. They criticized government, organized religion, laws, social institutions, and
creeping industrialization. They created an American "state of mind" in which imagination was
better than reason, creativity was better than theory, and action was better than contemplation.
And they had faith that all would be well because humans could transcend limits and reach
astonishing heights.